Cattleman Article

I’ll bet that in the last 12 months most of you have been to the sale barn. A lot of you probably walked through the pens. Some of you might have even bought some replacement heifers or pairs, hauled them home in the trailer, and turned them out with your herd.

I’ll bet that in the last 12 months a good many of you had a pot or a ground-loader drive onto your place either hauling calves in or hauling them out. I’ll bet that in the last 12 months a lot of you have been to the vet.

And, I’ll bet that in the last 12 months most of you didn’t think of any of these events as historic, momentous, or even particularly memorable. But they could’ve been. Because in the last 12 months, as all of you have gone about the business of being a cattle producer, many of you may have introduced the risk of biohazards onto your land and into your herds.

Webster says a biohazard is “a risk or danger to life or health.” And according to Dr. Max Coats, deputy executive director of the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC), the risk is up.

“Texas has 20 land ports, multiple sea ports, four international airports and a long, very permeable border,” he says. This means increased trade and increased travel, which in turn mean increased accidental risk. Combine that with the daily inter-farm traffic closer to home and the fact that livestock trade represents more than half of the animal agricultural industry in Texas, and the risk really begins to multiply.

But aside from accidental risk, Coats says, “Today, the joker in the deck is what someone might do intentionally.” Canada’s livestock industry is still reeling from its single, accidental case of BSE. The impact of an intentional, widespread outbreak of disease in this nations’ cattle herds would be crippling.

Before we can understand how to prevent disease from spreading, we have to understand how disease spreads. So here’s Pathology 101:

According to Dr. Coats, in order for a disease to live and thrive, you have to have three things (see graphic):

“It’s like a three-legged stool,” he says. “If you kick just one leg out from under it, the whole thing falls flat.” What a producer can do, then, is work hard to “kick out” at least one, if not more, legs of the stool. Coats offers this list as a good way to start:

Either buy them from someone you know and trust, or ask for verifiable health records on the animals, or, preferably, both. Also, quarantine them for up to 30 days before commingling with your herd. Use this time to watch for and treat any sign of disease.

Another vehicle is personnel, including you. Always disinfect your boots if you’ve been around someone else’s animals (this includes other ranches, the sale barn, or even the vet). And insist that others disinfect their boots or wear rubber or disposable over-boots before they come in contact with your pens or pastures. (See “Boot Cleanliness Basics.”)

SIDEBAR

Boot Cleanliness Basics

When it comes to preventing the movement of disease, “soap and water and a set of rubber boots can go a long way,” says Dr. Max Coats, Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC). There are literally hundreds of disinfectants on the market, including those that are iodine- or alcohol-based. Talk to the folks at your feed store and look for one that is labeled for the particular agent you’re trying to control.

A few things to remember:

According to Coats, “Clorox is even good for a lot of things.”

While labels will tell you what a disinfectant is good for, they won’t list everything that it’s good for. (That’s because, for the manufacturer, listing a disease on the label takes both research and money.) That’s why it’s a good to talk to the experts at the feed store.

Remember that most disinfectants don’t work well in the presence of soil. In other words, always hose off your boots (or your trailer or your tires) before you use the disinfectant.

Also control the quality of feed — know where you buy it, and store it properly to prevent disease-carrying rodents from getting into it.

If a lot of this seems like common sense, it is. If it seems like it’s in your best interest, it is. Like Dr. Coats says, “If you’d do for your livestock what you do for your kids, you’d have it whipped.”

But what about diseases that aren’t naturally occurring? What about things like bio-terrorism? What about exotic or foreign diseases? (Some of these have been introduced into herds by things like free-flying birds like cattle egrets that may have come all the way from the Caribbean.) It’s true: These are wildcards that livestock producers can’t control.

“That’s why you should be aware of your livestock,” says Coats. “Wonder what’s up” when you see things that are out of the ordinary: brightly colored yellow, orange or striped ticks; unusual fly larvae; or screwworm larvae, which, as old-timers will tell you, have a very distinct smell. Even if you didn’t introduce it into your herd, you can usually remove one of the legs of the stool to keep it from spreading.

Sometimes, even when you’re diligent and aware, disease happens anyway. When it does, the first call you should make is to your vet. He or she can not only help you treat the disease, but can also report it to TAHC or the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) if necessary so unusual clusters, or unusually high numbers of diseases, can be identified and responded to accordingly.

Texas law does not require producers to report disease, but it does require veterinarians to report some diseases based on a preliminary diagnosis. The big ones that everyone’s looking out for these days are FMD and anthrax, and here are five signs to watch for:

If a Kansas-based experiment takes hold, the future of disease tracking could go high tech. According to reports, a joint effort by Kansas State University and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque could result in a national reporting system called the Rapid Syndrome Validation Project for Animals (RSVP-A).

Based on Sandia’s RSVP-H software for humans, the project could gather data from vets all over the U.S. through the use of cell phones. This way a vet could immediately report disease outbreaks from the field simply by punching in a code and answering a series of questions on the screen.

“I think we’re a long ways from that,” says Coats of the project. “We would have to become a lot more sophisticated than we are, and the mindset of the industry would have to change,” he says. Despite the threat of bio-terror and the benefits to the industry of tracking disease outbreaks, “there are a lot of folks who’d just as soon everybody not know what’s on their ranch.”

In the nearer future, though, another already approved — though controversial — project may help the tracking of livestock diseases and the pinpointing of where they come from. It’s the national animal identification program and it’s just around the corner.

Its plan is to require electronic ID tags for every animal sold. If a steer were to come down with a case of foot and mouth disease, for instance, APHIS would be able to trace that animal’s steps from the feedyard back to the ranch it was on which it was born. Theoretically, every animal that steer had ever come in contact with could be identified within 48 hours.

Talk about knocking a leg out from under it. And this is all set to be up and running by 2005.

When it comes to preventing the spread of disease today, however, cattle producers’ responses run the gamut.

“Based on their experience, their travels, their own worldview and personal outlook,” says Coats, “they range from blissfully unaware to those who are almost paranoid.”

Hopefully you fall somewhere in between. At any rate, I’ll bet you’ll think about it next time you drive to your neighbor’s place to look at a bull, next time a strange trailer pulls up your drive, or next time you come home from the sale barn with the soil from someone else’s steers on your boots. It’s just common sense.